Recently I’ve taken up a few things which have changed my perspective on technology and the internet. The most recent has been Voices of the Void. The game was free, and I didn’t download it off Steam, it’s different from a lot of games I’ve played or would typically play, not only in its own nature but even in how I access it. It’s in a folder in my file manager, I have no shortcut to it, so I must navigate to it every time, even this small thing is exciting, but there is more.
The game incorporates custom content features, in game posters, paintings, television and radio programmes, printable 3d models, etc.
And so to spice things up I’ve been steadily importing more and more things into the game. Some I’ve needed help with, as they are inaccessible to my simple understanding of these operations, but in all areas I am trying to learn. Particularly exciting to me is the process of learning how to download videos and music. It’s completely foreign to me, but the idea is fascinating, to be able to pluck these things out from “thin air” and manipulate them as you wish, it truly is in the vain of that old internet which I do so admire, not for particular aesthetic reasons, but for practical, pragmatic, and stylistic ones.
I’ve also taken up the task of making my own website. Again, I’m only early in my learning. It's crude, my techniques are poor, and my eyes are bigger than my stomach, but it’s thrilling!
To be able to customize, with perfect control, your appearance and your voice in the internet presents so much potential, and so many avenues for creative endeavours.
Indeed, the reason I took up writing and soon video making as I now have was in part due to this development.
There was a time when I felt that the internet was an adversary to human agency. To my agency. I felt helpless and under its complete control.
Addicted to something which gave me no tangible benefit in return. I still can feel this way, and am reminded of it often.
All of this information, all the potential, squandered and sequestered away by owners, by a few small minded narcissists, too incompetent to realize what potential they owned.
Too greedy to let something be good and free.
But that mask of ownership is being peeled away for me. There is a beautiful and delicate face beneath.
The enchanting offer of the internet is agency. An individual’s total command of information. This is what’s so exciting.
People today are mortified by misinformation, deceptions which serve tyrannical machinations. And they condemn untruth outright, out of hand.
Perhaps I’m careless, and certainly too much of a romantic, but why limit oneself to truth, when untruth is not in itself necessarily evil. Truth and untruth are both servants, for servants there is no morality, truth does not choose to be good, nor untruth chooses to be evil.
There is no moral in unchoice. Without choice, how can just condemnation be made?
Let us nurture them both; the arts and the sciences, let them intercourse, and develop a new vision both of substance and colouration.
Do not silence frivolous speech, but speak frivolously to your own end. Negation brings nothing, and therein is defeated by the positive force. Only action delivers victory, and the particular action is irrelevant.
The internet delivers to us the perfect artistic medium. Direct and transcendent access to the soul. Do not misunderstand, one should not abandon their body for this, but access both with temperance and intention (agency).
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It is my opinion that the present strain of technological development under individual ownership is a hopelessly fruitless endeavour.
Yet hope is not lost.
As was my first lesson in this soul world, ownership of the parts of this world is as futile as owning grains of white beach that wash in and out of the sea.
Their dominion is fragile, and untenable.
It is my most sincere belief, that with an organized and concerted campaign to do so, the internet could be liberated from its present languishing state. And that this could be achieved in my lifetime.
Those who know me also know my tendencies, and I wish to explain one, as I feel it is relevant to the topic at hand. In the past I’ve called myself a luddite, a technophobe, I’ve advocated for the wholesale destruction of the internet. I doubt these things will change, they aren’t informed by reason but rather the strongest shock of feeling.
I’m incredibly fearful of what this world may become. Of what the future may bear against us. And, perhaps most ironic of all, what I fear more than that, is the loss of the potential of this place. For that beautiful face to be shattered, just as it is fully revealed to me.
It’s funny, it’s only the loss of a dream. Waking up. And yet this whole world is a dream, isn’t it? This world is the funniest of all.
One is blind to the world when his eyes are closed, yet blind to himself when they open.